WORK: Titles from Excerpts: Nathaniel’s Perpetual Motion

“He is lying on his stomach again for the second time this evening. To the left of his head is a glob of saliva half-absorbed into the carpet. It fell there from his mouth while his efforts were absorbed in defying the gravity tugging at his entire body – under the circumstances, oral spillage was a necessary concession. Once he stops feeling so weak in the arms, he will get up, find his shit sponge, and clean up the little, watery mess on the floor.”

2011. Ink on paper. 3.5 x 3.75 in.

This image-text pairing originally appeared on VerySmallKitchen as part of a 3-month online residency.

“All the while his pet project (still a work in progress) is playing through the terminal’s speakers. The sounds of double bass, trumpet, and xylophone are completely unrecognizable as they play overlaid but artificially extended chords. The track reaches the point that exceeds the portion Nathaniel has been manipulating, and immediately the playback returns to its native and unaltered tempo. This sudden change of melodic flow steals Nathaniel’s focus from the perceived almost-eternity of wobbly exertion, and he drops limp-armed a few inches down to the ground (his body would have given up right about now even if he hadn’t been distracted by the music).”

2011. Ink on paper. 3.75 x 7 in.

This image-text pairing originally appeared on VerySmallKitchen as part of a 3-month online residency.

“He has yet to complete a single pushup, though he has been attempting for a while without interruption to perform one from start to finish. Embarrassingly, his arms seem content to maintain an involuntary shuddering motion that only affects the rest of his body along a horizontal plane, rather than aid in accomplishing the task at hand. Is this uncontrollable vibration in fact a perpetual motion, or is it a friction? It resists progression, yet remains ceaselessly frenetic (or so it seems to Nathaniel, who cannot currently conceive of a conclusion to his discomfort and toil).”

2011. Ink on paper. 3.75 x 3.5 in.

This image-text pairing originally appeared on VerySmallKitchen as part of a 3-month online residency.

“Nathaniel recalls his grandfather’s tales of toilet paper use; of how at times one could wipe and wipe and wipe after defecating with no indication of a progression toward cleanliness. Of course nowadays toilet paper has been replaced by superabsorbent synthetic sponges, which leave no trace of solid matter, nor liquid, nor even bacteria, upon their surfaces after wiping.”

2011. Ink on paper. 7 x 7 in.

This image-text pairing originally appeared on VerySmallKitchen as part of a 3-month online residency.

“The extreme absorbency of these sponges guarantees that they are perpetually sterile. For this reason, it is common practice to both wipe up household messes and clean one’s genital and anal territories using the same sponge.”

2011. Ink on paper. 7.5 x 7 in.

This image-text pairing originally appeared on VerySmallKitchen as part of a 3-month online residency.

“An individual need only possess a single sponge during the span of his or her lifetime. The sponges neither wear out nor diminish in absorbency. Most of the original models are still in circulation. Nathaniel inherited his from his father, who had previously acquired the sponge from Nathaniel’s grandfather. [ . . . ] The sponge compacts all that it absorbs into its core. Such is its efficiency that the area occupied by the compacted matter gains no measurable increase in volume during the course of a generation. Nathaniel envisions a future in which a sponge passed down a bloodline eventually accumulates, after many centuries, so much human detritus that it collapses into a shit singularity, and ultimately devours whole solar systems.”

2011. Ink on paper. 7 x 7.25 in.

This image-text pairing originally appeared on VerySmallKitchen as part of a 3-month online residency.

“After wasting several hours working on this musical project, Nathaniel realizes that there is no possibility of ever listening to a completed version of the track. For the music to become infinitely slower as playback progresses, it can never reach its end. To listen to the work in progress would be to listen to something both incomplete and complete at the same time. The unfinished project has not accomplished what is intended of it, and yet it will play to a point of completion. The completed project has attained a goal, a conclusion, but an infinite repetition of technique is required of Nathaniel to enact the proposed design. To declare “done” is to quit the project. In all ways conceivable, the work can never be finished. To listen to it at any stage, no matter how close – or not close – to being what he wants it to be, is indicative of failure.”

2011. Ink on paper. 8.5 x 6.75 in.

This image-text pairing originally appeared on VerySmallKitchen as part of a 3-month online residency.

“The tune will not loop, but instead continue to play toward its unattainable termination while steadily reducing speed. Nathaniel attempts to achieve this by creating points on the sound file’s timeline and stretching them apart. The first point is a nanosecond from the start of the track. The second point is initially a nanosecond from the first point, but Nathaniel increases this distance to two nanoseconds. The distance continues to increase in ever larger proportions between each successive point. Eventually, there will be a distance between two points that is too long for Nathaniel to comprehend. Nathaniel refers to this as Segment X. Inconceivable is how much greater the length of the subsequent segment is to that of Segment X. Equally inconceivable is how far less the length of the preceding segment is to that of Segment X.”

2011. Ink on paper. 8.5 x 7 in.

This image-text pairing originally appeared on VerySmallKitchen as part of a 3-month online residency.

“He has been lying on his stomach for the past ten minutes. Feeling dejected, he lifts himself up from floor, and powers up the computer terminal in the wall. He swiftly navigates through a tree of subdirectories and starts up a hidden rudimentary sound editing program that he had discovered just last week. Once the software is running, he opens one of the three sound files contained on the hard drive – this one is a nondescript piece of soft jazz, most likely preloaded for demonstration purposes. Nathaniel begins to edit the timeline of the tune, attempting to slow it down gradually so that it will never play through to its end.”

2011. Ink on paper. 9.5 x 6.75 in.

This image-text pairing originally appeared on VerySmallKitchen as part of a 3-month online residency.

ABOUT:
Lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. Primarily interested in the following: a) Visual and textual lines; b) the antiseptic tempered by a quiver of the handmade; and c) the diagrammatic and/or explanatory, especially when cloaked in ostensible self-importance without necessarily being true, serious business. Adherence to stringent procedural methods allows for an iterative exploration of the above concepts ad infinitum [read more].
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